Hi everybody, this is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the daily critique. Today’s image was submitted by Roger who s an advanced photographer. Roger took this image on Martha ’s Vineyard. He said he found out about the location from a friend. He said that he bracketed multiple frames here and used hydra and HDR processing which is high dynamic range to extend the dynamic range. He says he likes the way the colors in the dynamic range sort of match how he remembered the day. Roger took this with a Nikon D700 with 24-70 lenses and the effective focal length o 70 mm and at F13 one of the main exposures of F13 at 180th of a second.

He bracketed around that. Roger says that he likes this in a black and white conversion and what I prefer is black and whiter color and also just like hear about in any other perfect world improvements. Let's get right into it here; one of the things that I really enjoy about the image is the quality of light. I get a really great sense moving through this part of the image. The feeling of sidelight and also some places there are in soft light, some places are in more direct light and then soft light again, and that really helps to create the feeling of being able to move through the image to my minds eye and really like the way the light hitting the warm part of this landscape shot. It also helps to add depth, it really accentuates the warm part and it makes the cool part in this case recede even more.

The other thing that I enjoy about the image is, just it's really beautiful quality of lines, some really beautiful repeating diagonals in this part of the scene. And I love the way that pushes up against this really beautiful area of what looks like a rocky beach and a little bit of a lagoon. I like the way the color transitions here too, from the warm out into the green and then you can follow the green around in the water. A nice textured sky here too. There’s the potentially for even more depth in the sky and I'm really enjoying that.

One of the things that we can do right away is just go into channels before we do any other work and just look at these different channels in black and white and just from a basic conversion standpoint just sort of see what we think. And I think with some work maybe combining some channels you could end up with a pretty nice black and white version of this image but for me in this particular case, I really much prefer the colored version. To me when I look at this image it's really sort of this part of it in here that seems to be one of the main subjects and the color really helps to bring that out.

When this goes to black and white, you end up with quite a lot of sort of midtowns and high midtowns so you don’t have the tunnel separation. We could of course push that with levels and curves adjustments and things like that but to me there’s not nearly as much separation. And that in fact ends up making the image pretty complex. I think it's a simpler image in color because colors are already separating in a very simple way. It’s almost as if shapes are colors and colors are shapes already in this image. And so, let's just talk about the color version. One of the things that I think about when I look at this image is that it's really sort of this movement in the way this comes together is the most exciting part of the image for me.

And to me this is just sort of context that makes this even more dramatic. Not only do you have these beautiful lines and you have the beautiful color, and you have the beautiful beach, everything when you see all these water and sort of get the sense of the ocean and then the sky up here, it just makes this into my mind it's not even more dramatic. What does happen for me on the horizontal line is that this area right here sort of rhymes one of the main ideas and then this area right behind this shape to the right where it starts to really get bright again. This really pulls my eye and it starts to make me think about what’s over here at the frame.

And it also, in a lot of ways, starts to compete with this idea over here. It’s just sort of concept that two ideas that are the same or have about the about the same visual weight can really start to divide the viewers attention. Having said all that, one of the things that I would do to this image if I was printing it myself is I would come over and crop to right here and make this more of a square something like this, swing go back and forth and now sort of see what we think about that.

I think this really sort of brings your eye down into this part of the image now, and from here I know that Roger’s already said this is sort of the way that he saw the image. not so much on the documentary school of photography, I would look at this and how I would sort of say what is the main idea and then I would try to accentuate that and bring it froward. I’d like a little more contrast, you know. When I look at the histogram right now, there’s great detail everywhere. You can say that we’ve got detail on the blacks and detail on the whites but the truth is, if we shot this on film particularly slide film, we wouldn’t have all these details. We would have much more in the way of a black point and we also would have some areas that are light points if we shot this on a slide.

So one of the first things I would do to the image is I would go to the adjustment panel and choose levels. And I would just go ahead and just add a true white point in the image and give it a little bit more of a black point. I'm going to do that in normal blending mode, upon the color a little bit more, go back to layers, click on the mask, hit the X key to make the background color ALT delete or control delete to fill the mask with black. grab my brush, I'm painting on a mask to change either color or contrast or values. Some may have zero hardness on the brush and I'm going to start on a really low opacity. I’ve already got 10% set that sounds pretty good.

Then, I'm going to get a pretty big brush here and I'm going to come in and bias this in terms of bringing the contrast up; and the area that I feel like is the main part of the image. so it just come in and I'm doing this pretty fast and little rough but I would take a little bit more time but you get the idea here that I'm biasing the whole thing towards this area that I want to sort of have the most energy. Then once I did that biasing, I would then take a much bigger brush, come in, and play around with adding more contrast to the whole scene. And then I may come back in to the sky here and bias some of these areas to try to get an even more feeling of texture and depths. I'm just going to come in and sort of hit the areas where the clouds are already white and again, I'm doing this in a rough way.

I’d pick smaller brushes but for the sake of the video, you get the idea. Then I could command in the same layer and just continue to sort of drive some local contrast in here by hitting areas that are already bright. Where there’s a flow of energy this sort of ties into driving the eye down into this area which is the sort of the main place that I want to drive the eye. We could command and do that and create a little bit of movement in here. And this is the work that we’ve done so far. And then from here I think the other thing that you could do is you could darken this down a little bit from the top.

The other thing that I think about n this image is that if was there shooting, I would’ve been looking for a way where I can get the composition as far as the dark part of it to come all the way out here to the corner. I think that would be a really nice touch. I think it would help the balance. These ideas up here from top to bottom and bring this around to the corner. And think that it would tighten the image up a littler bit you could definitely could do that with the information that we have here. you could take this and scale it out and then blend it back in; just a thought, because again I'm not that much into sort of the editorial idea of the image and more sort of reality just kind of being at a starting point. I might consider doing that for this image; it would be interesting to know if that would’ve possible with the framing.

And a lot more that we could do to this but let's just leave it there for today. I would love to hear your feedback about this critique. I would love to hear what Roger thinks about, a big thank you to him for submitting this really beautiful landscape image to The Mindful Eye’s daily critique.